The executions are carried out at dawn on Haqlania bridge, the entrance to Haditha. A small crowd usually turns up to watch even though the killings are filmed and made available on DVD in the market the same afternoon.One of last week’s victims was a young man in a black tracksuit. Like the others he was left on his belly by the blue iron railings at the bridge’s southern end. His severed head rested on his back, facing Baghdad. Children cheered when they heard that the next day’s spectacle would be a double bill: two decapitations. A man named Watban and his brother had been found guilty of spying.

With so many alleged American agents dying here Haqlania bridge was renamed Agents’ bridge. Then a local wag dubbed it Agents’ fridge, evoking a mortuary, and that name has stuck.

A three-day visit by a reporter working for the Guardian last week established what neither the Iraqi government nor the US military has admitted: Haditha, a farming town of 90,000 people by the Euphrates river, is an insurgent citadel.

That Islamist guerrillas were active in the area was no secret but only now has the extent of their control been revealed. They are the sole authority, running the town’s security, administration and communications.. . .DVDs of beheadings on the bridge are distributed free in the souk. Children prefer them to cartoons. “They should not watch such things,” said one grandfather, but parents appeared not to object.

One DVD features a young, blond muscular man who had been disembowelled. He was said to have been a member of a six-strong US sniper team ambushed and killed on August 1. Residents said he had been paraded in town before being executed.

The US military denied that, saying six bodies were recovered and that all appeared to have died in combat. Shortly after the ambush three landmines killed 14 marines in a convoy which ventured from their base outside the town.

Twice in recent months marines backed by aircraft and armour swept into Haditha to flush out the rebels. In a pattern repeated across Anbar there were skirmishes, a few suspects killed or detained, and success was declared.

In reality, said residents, the insurgents withdrew for a few days and returned when the Americans left. They have learned from last November’s battle in Falluja, when hundreds died fighting the marines and still lost the city.

The Supreme Court rejected an appeal Tuesday from an atheist father over Boy Scout recruiting at his son’s public school.

John Scalise had asked the court to bar public schools from opening their doors to Boy Scout recruiters and promoting membership, arguing that the group discriminates against nonreligious boys and parents by denying them membership if they don’t swear to religious oaths.. . .A Michigan appeals court said that Mount Pleasant schools allowed other organizations to use class facilities, including a hospital group, an Indian tribe, a Baptist church, and a hockey association.

Scalise argued that his son, Benjamin, was taunted by classmates and humiliated by a Boy Scout recruiter in front of other students. Benjamin Scalise is now 17.

The Supreme Court’s last Boy Scout case was in 2000. Justices ruled 5-4 at the time that the Boy Scouts can bar gays from serving as troop leaders. The ruling was written by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who died last year.

Davao City in the Phillipines is hosting the International Urban Scout Jamboree this week.

there’s no special relationship between CO2 and poison ivy. Increases in CO2 make all plants grow faster and healthier. So yes, poison ivy and poison oak and kudzu all benefit from increased atmospheric C02. But so do rain forests, fruit trees, crops, and flowers. Indeed, as we’ve seen from previous warm periods such as the medieval one, global warming directly benefits crops by extending growing seasons and allowing crops in places previously to cold to even allow them.

While on the subject of noxious fumes, Chomski continues to spout off.

At the blogsThe Daily Ablution writes about Johann Hari’s disgraceful contempt for Bjørn Lomborg.In the same post, commenter Nigel links to a CNN story where the wounded CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier admitted that

“I can’t go out and hunt a story. I’m having to wait for it to come to me, or I’m having to train Iraqi translators to go out and be my eyes, be my ears, ask the questions that I would ask if I could.”

Montfermeil borders Clichy-Sous-Bois, where last year’s riots began after two youngsters died while apparently fleeing police. In the three weeks of rioting that followed in poor suburbs around France, some 9,000 vehicles and dozens of public buildings and businesses were torched.

When you strip away the red from Hugo Chavez’s rhetoric and the dishonest propaganda glorifying him from the world’s left-wing press, the naked Chavez turns out to be little more than an old-fashioned Latin American military dictator like Pinochet, a prating megalomaniac Caudillo propped up mostly by secret police and stolen oil money. Even the New York Times, if only to save its own waning credibility, has begun to report Chavez’s defects and decline.

The world is more interconnected, and Latin America is no exception. Globalization has become the norm and governments increasingly play by the rules of investment and economic exchange. Brazil’s president, Lula, recently cited economic stability as one of his triumphs, declaring that the future “will be built on strong investment in education and training, with tax relief to encourage new investment, notably in science and technology.” Additionally, Peru and Colombia have now struck free-trade agreements with the U.S — and Ecuador and Panama may be next.

As his power and influence grow, Mr. Chávez and his tactics are running into limits in a region where most people resent outside interference — be it Spanish rule centuries ago or U.S. intrusion in recent decades. Support for Mr. Chávez has become a political flashpoint in races in Mexico and Peru.

Mr. Chávez’s support of Bolivia’s decision to kick out foreign energy companies this month and nationalize its natural-gas reserves has also put him in direct confrontation with Brazil, South America’s largest economy. Brazil depends on Bolivia for half its natural gas, and Petrobras, Brazil’s state oil company, is the biggest foreign investor in Bolivia’s energy industry.

Mr. Chávez also may face stiffened opposition at home. Although he is still highly popular, his overseas spending makes growing numbers of Venezuelans angry. Despite high oil prices, problems like street crime and poverty have continued to loom large under his rule.

But Hugo’s money – along with the ever-present Cuban “doctors” – is going a long way towards buying Evo much needed popularity among the underclass:

Mr. Morales has also adopted many of Mr. Chávez’s social programs, including the use of Cuban doctors and teachers in poor neighborhoods. An estimated 708 Cuban doctors and volunteers have set up six clinics that offer, among other things, free eye consultations. At a Santa Cruz clinic, 200 Bolivians recently stood in a line that snaked around the block, waiting in the hot sun to get appointments for an eye examination. The clinic performs 100 free cataract operations daily. Some patients spent the night sleeping on the steps of the clinic. “It’s a miracle,” said Juan Alvarez, 56, an upholsterer awaiting surgery on an eye that clouded up three years ago after an injury.

Literacy classes are also a big hit. In a cramped classroom on the wind-swept plateau above La Paz, a few dozen Aymara Indian women and men gathered around a television set recently to learn the alphabet. At the end of the day’s session, Hugo Chura, the Bolivian official in charge of the program, stood up to give a pitch. “Previous governments here never cared about you,” he said in the Aymara language. “But the new president does. And he has friends like Fidel Castro and the Venezuelans who care about you, too.” The class broke out in applause.

Thanks to such programs, Mr. Morales’s approval ratings now hover above 80%. That will come in handy in early July, when the country votes to elect a new assembly to rewrite the constitution.

If you think any of the investments will yield wealth to the poor, you are mistaken: The Wall Street Journal has an article today, Chávez Pushes Boliva, Cuba Trade, which points to ruinous politically-driven command economies:

Some of the basics of ALBA trade have yet to be worked out. When Bolivian entrepeneurs asked Mr. Aguirre [a merchant at a trade fair last week] for his Venezuelan-made paper, he said he didn’t know yet. “We have nothing concrete on that”, he said. In the background of his booth was a poster of Mr. Chávez, his arm draped around Mr. Morales, while in the background a smiling Mr. Castro looked approvingly on both men.

Elsewhere Bolivian Indian women in traditional bowler hats met with Cuban trade officials and Venezuelan entrepeneurs, who encouraged them to sell alpaca sweaters and embroidered shawls in Cuba and Venezuela, although neither country is known for cold weather.. . .It was tough going, acknowledged Rina Zeballos, president of the 1,200-trong Movement of Indian Women of the Kollasuyo, a weaver’s cooperative. “We are producing these shawls, but we don’t have a market”

No amount of Hugo’s money can change the weather. Maybe his buddy Red Ken should help him market some sweaters in the UK instead of in the tropics. But Hugo and Evo are talking confederation, so odds are they won’t be sweating the alpaca marketing details.

The vast majority of students at the three-year-old university grew up in poverty. Now they are recipients of a tuition-free education. They are also part of a massive underclass that Chavez aims to empower through the social programs that have fed his domestic popularity. The school, the cornerstone of those programs, is aimed at educating millions and promoting the sort of social activism that Chavez says can help Venezuela’s poor majority to overcome decades of oppression by the rich.

The Bolivarian University of Venezuela, a large-scale, PR excercise rich in propaganda, is not quite as the WaPo makes it. Instead, according to a first-hand account (via email),

The story is baloney. When I was in caracas, I put on the red t-shirt and checked this stupid thing out. Teaching at it were old grussies from the 1960s, long gray hippie-haired idiots who had been in the cold too long, wretched miserable, meritless “academics” who hadalways formed the hardcore left in vz society and were too fanatical and extreme to ever fit in at a real university. Think “professional protestor” and you will get the picture. They knew nothing. One got up and did a spiel on atomic energy, showing a drawing of the famous atom star and explained that this was proof chavismo worked. It was that nutty, that meritless. And they were heavy rum drinking drunks, who ernestly played guitar after every class. Gee groovy.

As for the people in it, none were there because they wanted to be. They were there because of the govt check it involved. I was wondering why mom, pop and ghetto baby in head-to-toe red were all there, why young college students were there, and then i looked at the sign in sheet – it was everyone saying they were associated with some chavista schooling program. It was the checks that made them listen to the indoctrination, nothing more.

Chavez may in any case be obliged to concentrate on problems at home. Despite bumper revenues from high oil prices, Venezuela’s central bank said last week that it had lost $142m (£76m) in the first four months of this year, largely because Chavez’s administration had overspent.

Fears that Azerbaijan has systematically destroyed hundreds of 500-year-old Christian artefacts have exploded into a diplomatic row, after Euro MPs were barred from inspecting an ancient Armenian burial site.

The predominantly Muslim country’s government has been accused of “flagrant vandalism” similar to the Taliban’s demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan.

The claims centre on the fate of rare “khachkars”, stone crosses carved with intricate floral designs, at the burial ground of Djulfa in the Nakhichevan region of Azerbaijan, an enclave separated from the rest of the country by Armenia.

Major-General Frantisek Perina, who has died aged 95, escaped from Czechoslovakia to become one of the leading fighter pilots with the French Air Force in 1940, and then joined the RAF; when the Second World War ended, he returned to his homeland but had to flee again when the Communists took power.

Memorial Day was originally known as Decoration Day (for decorating the graves of the Civil War dead, which decimated over 600,000 Americans, nearly 2% of the total population of the Union and Confederacy), but at the turn of the 19th century it was designated as Memorial Day.

Memorial Day was first observed on May 30, 1868. In 1971 its observance was extended to honor all soldiers who died in American wars. At Arlington National Cemetery a wreath is placed at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and each grave is decorated with a small American flag.

Today let us all join in thanks to those who continue to serve our country.

Yesterday at Barnes and Noble they had a huge table of Da Vinci Code hype materials, among them not only the several versions of Dan Brown’s books, but also a few books on the Louvre, Leonardo, and jigsaw puzzzles of the Last Supper.

And the latest on Da Vinci hype:

It made me wonder, what’s next?

Since I was pressed for time, I didn’t check the details, but I can envision Dan Brown starting a franchise of gyms, The Da Vinci Gnostic Health Clubs (“Your pain is our gain”), where instead of yoga you hear him drone on about all Catholic-related conspiracy theories, and where all the personal trainers are crazed albinos chasing after you with a whip.